The introduction of tapeless workflows in our industry represents a paradigm shift in the way that we acquire, edit and deliver content. The ability to eliminate the capture process means that edited content can be turned around faster than ever before.
Tapeless workflows offer us an opportunity to reinvent the editing workflow. While the old process of ingesting from tape doesn’t apply, there are many other areas of the process that can be streamlined. For example, rather than logging a small amount of information for each segment of a tape as part of the capture process, we can now take care of all the information in a single session. And the whole idea of “export to tape” becomes less important, with delivery mechanisms going tapeless as well.
With these opportunities come challenges. The rigid production process imposed by the tape-based paradigm ensures that there is at least some consistency from facility to facility. With tapeless, freedom could mean chaos.
Editors need fast, efficient ways to log their content and to add additional metadata. With the increasing importance of metadata in workflows from broadcast to videography, getting that information into the editing workflow is important. I don’t think any one editing application has solved this problem, yet.
At Adobe we believe that true native editing is the best workflow wherever possible. In a tapeless world, true native editing means that you can start editing immediately without having to wait for rewrapping or transcoding. This enables extremely quick turnaround on content because you can edit directly from the camera without even transferring to the edit station. From a quality perspective, keeping the source around means the highest quality results because you’re always rendering from the original frames. And from a metadata perspective, it’s possible to add metadata to the original source files, which helps immensely when the assets are managed centrally.
The next few years are going to be very exciting in the editing world. We’re committed to finding new ways for you all to work more efficiently and productively!
Giles Baker
Group Product Manager, Editing Workflows.
Dynamic Media, Adobe.
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Adobe has not implemented support yet for the Sony PMW-EX1 which is selling like crazy. I’ve already steered three of my clients to FCP. It would be great if Adobe at least says “we are working on it”, so we can decide if we want to wait for it or not. Third party plugins like Mainconcept or Cineform may work, but it’s not the same as being supported by the father of the baby.
Posted by on 03/14 at 11:15 AM
Our work on P2 has given us a perfect architecture for native support of MXF wrapped essences ..... all done right .... native editing, no unwrapping, no re-wrapping, and essence permitting no transcoding.
So I think our actions speak for themselves. Now that we’re not porting to Mac, and the application is fully re-architected for the future .... we’re much freer to work on features and formats ... that’s what allowed us to get P2 done mid-cycle. Fun times ahead 
That said, we’re very thankful for our rich ecosystem of partners ..... the openness of our applications is one of the greatest things about them .... we hope that no customer will ever find themselves in a dead-end, because our partners can pretty much always find a way.
Simon
Sr. Dir. Product Management
Dynamic Media
Adobe
Posted by Simon Hayhurst on 03/16 at 09:21 PM
I think what Daniel, and what I (as a pretty loyal PPro user) feel is just that we’d like to know that we can count on Adobe to be there for we users with support for new products. I am currently debating on which HD camera to buy - Panasonic with P2 or the Sony EX1. If Adobe came out and said, “EX1 support is coming”, that would make my decision almost right away. But without knowing if it’s coming - either soon or never(thus making us rely on 3rd parties), I have to play a guessing game - and makes me jealous of my FCP editing friends.
I’ve been an Adobe user long enough to know that “mum’s the word” when it comes to the future about products, but it’s sometimes really hard to plan for the future when the software developer you depend on keeps you in the dark.
Posted by on 03/26 at 03:39 PM
Hey Eric ---
First of all ... thanks for being a loyal PPro user .... it’s been quite a journey. I hope you’re enjoying CS3
You touch on one of the most interesting discussions inside Adobe ..... In the world of blogs, wikis and web-sites where it’s much easier to share information and receive feedback .... what is the right place to draw the line between complete secrecy and complete transparency.
Being tightly secretive makes for more buzz when you announce, and more buzz around rumours and speculation (remind you of anyone ? 
.
That’s actually really good for revenue (which shareholders and Wall Street seem to like a lot . It also makes it hard on competitors because they don’t have much time to react (eg if they hadn’t already been working on the same thing, then they could be months or years behind ... think of Motorola and Nokia reacting to iPhone for example).
But it’s actually pretty bad for customers .... they have poor guidance on what to expect, and less chance to give input that makes the product better. So companies look to private betas, focus groups, surveys etc to minimize that feedback downside, while maximizing the advantage of the “surprise”.
Being completely transparent has the clear benefit of making it easy for customers to make good decisions, and the huge benefit of making it easier for us to make better products because we get lots of feedback early. It has the downside the there’s less “news” in the finished product, which tends to hurt revenue, and it makes it much easier for competitors to react and counter all that hard work and innovation.
The trend in Adobe is to being much more open .... so you see more of our products go on labs and get demo’d earlier (think about Adobe Media Player which was demo’d last NAB, and went into labs last year ... http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mediaplayer/)
Personally I really, really like the benefits of serving customers better, and I’m ok with managing some of the revenue risks and competitive risks that come with being open. I guess you could say that ultimately being a good partner to you in your workflows and problems works best for both you and Adobe.
I’d love to get to the point where our customers, and our non-customers alike, collectively agree that Adobe listens, cares and reacts to your needs and opinions.
Within that, Adobe still has some pretty deep caution around being very open on specific products and features.
I will say that now that we’ve completely re-architected Premiere Pro, and completed the port, we’re in a much better position to innovate and to fill key workflow gaps.
P2 was one example, and as you saw, we did it after CS3 shipped and delivered it as a free upgrade to all users .... things like Sony EX1 and AVCHD are high on that same list of stuff we want done as soon as possible.
Still no comment on the “when” ... but it is a “when”, not an “if”.
That may not help you with an immediate purchase decision, but .... hey ... it’s progress, right ?
Simon
(listening and caring
Posted by Simon Hayhurst on 03/26 at 04:24 PM
Nice article…
I have been a loyal Premiere user for 5 years now and I enjoy using Premiere, I love it actually!
With regards to “surprising” the competition with what Adobe plans to release, well… that is a problem for me. Adobe has always been somewhat behind in this respect. P2 support came after everyone bought Final Cut because Premiere could not do it.
Premiere needs to innovate and not play catch-up all the time. Look at what Final Cut offers, look at what AVID offers, offer the same and then more. Like native support for .R3D RAW files from the RED camera.
Please give us feedback on submitted bug reports. I never hear a response from the bug report submission, nobody emails me and says YES we can recreate and provide fix or a workaround for that bug, or NO we could not replicate it. This is what users want. My titler still crashes when I install more than 100 fonts. The 3.1.1 fix does not help.
Stability and speed should be first on the list for Premiere. My main gripe with it is that it always crashes even on my new Quad core with 4GB RAM. “Sorry a serious error has occured premiere will now shut down” is highly un-productive.
There is a memory management bug somewhere in Premiere. Take 50-150 clips of HDV or HD or DVCPRO HD or even lowly SD and start editing as the project gets bigger the crashes get more frequent. It always pops up saying “premiere is running low on system memory”.
How many Hollywood films have been edited on Premiere Pro....?? Why cause it does not have a solid post production workflow behind it. It intergrates with the other applications like Photoshop and AfterFX better than any other product does but Premiere itself is the weak link.
I am not ranting but trying to get points across that seem to be ignored with every release.
That said CS3 is a big step in the right direction and I want to say thank you. But now look at the competition and try figure out what it is that makes Final Cut so coveted in the editing world. Stability and product support.
One last thing PLEASE check your User to User forums every once in a while, this is where your userbase can be found and the forum is a fantastic place to get response from users.
Thanks.
Posted by Chris Harvey on 04/06 at 06:13 AM
To Adobe, I really hope you get the XDCam EX import working right the first time around. I’ve tried the third-party plugin trials and one has a workflow that breaks any benefit of tapeless, and the other leaks memory like a sieve and crashes Premiere in mere seconds.
I’ve grown tired of trying to edit XDCam footage in Sony Vegas; I’ve been a Premiere user since 2001 and I just can’t get past the awkwardness of Vegas. I really hope that the NAB Show brings to light that which Adobe users have been yearning for for at least two years.
Posted by Mark Weiss on 04/10 at 09:49 PM
Chris, Mark,
Thanks for the great comments. Your points are well taken.
For your Premiere crashing bug, do you have the latest CS3 ? We’d definitely be interested in learning more.
As for secrets and surprises ...... ah well, for this NAB at least, you’ve to bear with us, and we’ll deliver some fun stuff to chat about next week.
Best,
Simon
Posted by Simon Hayhurst on 04/10 at 11:11 PM
Hi Simon.
Thanks for your response. I am sorry about the tone of my post, I meant no harm. I was just trying to give constructive feedback as a very regular and professional user of Adobe products. AVID has just recently adjusted their approach to editing solutions based on customer requests. I want Premiere to be the best it can be.
Just get the programmers for After Effects to write some code for Premiere CS4 and all will be good. After Effects is extremely stable under any environment, and is what Premiere should be minus a few things.
Vegas is a very capable NLE but as Mark notes I too find the interface not to my taste, I have Vegas 7 and mainly use it for audio more than video.
I am running CS 3.1.1.
I just feel Premiere should be more robust than it currently is. I can make it crash quite quickly on any system. Check the forums most threads are about crashes. I know every system has bugs and problems but Premiere needs to get the basics right first.
I hope the memory issues I hope will be sorted out in CS4. I read somewhere that there are plans to migrate Photoshop to 64bit, hopefully Premiere will follow. I can’t wait to use 32GB RAM for my HD work where it is needed most.
Simon, please surprise us at NAB!
Chris
Posted by Chris Harvey on 04/11 at 09:01 AM
Hello Simon,
Thanks for a quick followup.
Yes, we are running the current update, 3.1.1 of Premiere CS3.
The problem is that the 3rd party plugin makes Premiere even more unstable. Running a timeline with an unrendered title can exhaust all available 32-bit address space in about 20-30 seconds. Performance is also very sluggish on a 3.5GHz quad-core NLE.
The alternative 3rd party plugin requires all footage to be converted to an intermediate format, a time-consuming process, and as if that’s not enough, the gamma level shifts up and down depending on whether playback is paused or playing in Premiere.
I agree with Chris, that we need to be able to work with more RAM than the amount that 32-bit address space limits us to. However, I think there are things that can be done to tighten up the code in CS3 to make it more memory efficient, like Sony Vegas (which can edit XDCam footage on a 7 year old editing workstation with 1GB RAM, that we still have in service, albeit sluggishly)
and such optimizations will go far in giving CS3 the needed boost.
At any rate, we anxiously await liberation from our Vegas chains.
Posted by Mark Weiss on 04/11 at 09:59 AM
I’m surprised of how much all the posters in this thread have voiced my own concerns. If it was no clear in my first post, I’ve been using Premiere for a long long time in Macs and PCs and I love it. But hated when Premiere Pro stopped supporting QuickTime natively in Windows, and never got a respose on why they decided to do that from the good people of Adobe at the NAB, who always arrive with an excelent script and a very good show I really enjoy, but answer to very few of our gripes directly and candidly.
When Adobe says they solved the P2 problems elegantly I must agree, but it was too late for people who adopted that tapeless format, and you know this is an industry with a lightning fast adoption and turaround, Also I don’t think Adobe anounced strongly enough at the right professional channels that DVCPro and P2 were now native in Premiere CS3 in Windows.
As many have pointed out, Vegas’ interface is contrived and absurd and it’s very difficult to find good editors that know Vegas. If it weren’t so it would be a good alternative while we wait until Adobe gets the EX1 workflow working.
I also expect good news from Adobe at NAB, no only for Premiere but for other programs. We do a lot of sound engineering consulting, and Audition is a great application and a champion when encoding to mp3 to send a session abroad, but it takes forever when loading a file because it “has” to convert it to 32 bit and when you have a huge batch processing it’s a heavy wait.
See you at NAB everyone
Posted by on 04/11 at 12:56 PM
Mark,
Not sure which 3rd party tool you use but I have been using Cineform. I am going to upgrade to Prospect 2K quite soon as I expect to work with .r3d files, which requires a conversion to Cineform. It is better than ProRez… albeit not standard with Premiere.
I personally believe in the power of Cineforms codec, it really holds up better than the source, be it DVCPRO HD or HDCAM SR, and it keeps the bitrates quite manageable. It has support for 12 bit RAW data up to 4K, which is great since Premiere supports 4K resolutions; FCP maxes out at 2K. (I heard about Adobes plans for an open RAW format similar to DNG, sounds good...) I personally prefer to work online when I edit, it is just faster and more productive for me. That is one of the reasons why I like Cineform, not to mention the codec stands up well to multiple encodes and works with most if not all of my applications.
I do not mind the conversion process to CFHD files, because if I need to hand off to another editor I am able to do so, and to a Mac user if needs be. HD Link included with any Cineform products allows you to rewrap from MOV > AVI and vice versa without disturbing the underlying compression. This is great.
I find Cineform very stable across my systems and it very rarely crashes. The only consistent crash is it’s “cfhd importer’. Odd, but Cineform have a very great attitude towards bug fixes and customer care. David Taylor has saved me many times. Thanks. On that note thanks Simon and Adobe for the 3 updates/bug fixes for CS3 so far, it makes us user feel like our pleas are being heard. Keep 3.1.2 coming. 
I agree with Daniel I speak to people who still believe Premiere does not support DVCPRO and P2/mxf, it was not put out there for people to hear.
I would be willing to be a beta tester or a person who gives feedback on CS4 when the time comes, I am sure most users of the Premiere user forum would beta test. Sorry to harp on about the forums but they are a fantastic tool for people to use. I am able to network faster and learn about new ideas and trends quicker than anything I can think of. We all learn from reading each other’s problems and collectively provide insight for one another.
I firmly believe in getting what I pay for, this is why I speak openly about my feelings. As Mark pointed out Vegas is smooth under an old system, it slowly chugs along and will eventually get there. Premiere CS4 could break away from the pack by being more stable, more real-time and “more” in general.
Speaking of Audition it would be nice to have “Edit in Audition” restored to Premiere. Keep the integration with Soundbooth but add Audition. A large amount of customers were upset that this functionality was removed in CS3. Adobe products are the best integrated I can think, and this is one of its best selling points. Add to that cross platform support and you quickly see how powerful the tools become for an individual or business.
Once again I love Adobe products and I am not trying to be a smart ass, I am voicing my concerns. 
“I’m surprised of how much all the posters in this thread have voiced my own concerns”
At least I am not in the dark here…
Thanks
Chris
Posted by Chris Harvey on 04/11 at 02:32 PM
Speaking of EX1 support I often get into arguments as to what Premiere Pro should support. I am told Premiere Elements is where support for MPEG material such as AVCHD should be implemented.
I disagree, I feel Premiere should have constant updates to support the newest formats regardless of their popularity. HDCAM, AVC-Intra, AVCHD, XDCAM HD and EX are some examples of what needs to be supported. The industry changes very quickly and it is a storm out there. If I do not support the latest and greatest then clients look elsewhere which is bad for business.
HDV is a balancing act in CS3, Premieres’ capture tool does an okay job of capturing. However after things get more complex the audio begins to drift out of sync with HDV. More complex projects take longer to open and crash more often. Export issues start to arise, I have to try and export 3-4 times before an export is successful. Again “unkown error"…
In short Simon mentioned the reasons for wanting to stay ahead by not letting the competition know what you are planning. This is fine except we “the” customer base are left in the dark. I would not move to another platform if Premiere can do what FCP can do. Brand loyalty is one of my strong business beliefs.
Chris
Posted by Chris Harvey on 04/11 at 02:48 PM
“I will say that now that we’ve completely re-architected Premiere Pro”
In what way Simon?
Are ALL the 8 bit effects gone?
“I’d love to get to the point where our customers, and our non-customers alike, collectively agree that Adobe listens, cares and reacts to your needs and opinions.”
Me too.
Chris
Posted by Chris Harvey on 04/11 at 03:06 PM
I agree with Chris in that PPro should provide native support for as many formats as possible. As and editor, I have to be ready to edit in what ever format a client walks in the door with. And I shouldn’t have to spend extra money to get that level of support.
As for Adobe and PPro support, I honestly feel that things are heading in a great direction. There is more open discussion now going on between the Adobe team and we users...I think it could be better, but it’s a lot better now. In the past, it felt a bit like Willa Wonka handing out candy bars...the vast majority of we users knew there had to be someone making the software, we just never really saw them or heard from them until a new version was released.
As for not letting out information on new innovations and features, I am in total agreement that information like that has to be held in secret. But, when something like information on support for a new format is looked for - and especially when all the other NLE’s have offered support, I don’t see what the harm is in telling we customers the status on support for that format. You don’t have to tell us how it’s going to work, but something saying that it’s coming, and a rough time frame would be very, very helpful.
I, like others who’ve posted here, am a loyal PPro user. I want it to be the best it can be. I need it to be so I can better serve my clients. But I really am proud to be a PPro user. I take a lot of flack from other editors I know who edit with FCP and Avid...they really don’t know how great PPro is - but they can quickly point out it’s shortcomings, and sometimes they are right about them. I have a lot of hope that CS4 is going to level the playing field, and that the bad reputation that many editors feel about PPro and Adobe will be washed away.
I’ll be at NAB on Wednesday, and I look forward to any surprise annoucements (EX1 support please!), and in talking with as many Adobe people as possible.
Posted by on 04/11 at 03:22 PM
Chris, I did in fact trial CineForm Prospect 2K. However, unless you’re going to do extensive grading on your clips, the cumbersome and time-consuming conversion process and 3X the disc allocation on top of original XDCam files totally negates the workflow advantage of XDCam in the first place.
One of our criteria for choosing tapeless workflow was being able to have access to editing the files just minutes after the shoot. With Cineform, suddenly 30GB of XDCam expands to include 150GB of disc required, and considerable waiting for files to convert.
Then there is the problem of the black level shifting up and down when playing/pausing footage in Premiere--which is the REAL black level?
In short, if Cineform were the only option, we’d still be editing from tape. When you take into consideration the ballooning file sizes for Cineform files, an NLE spec’d for XDCam footage with all internal RAID 0 arrays, now needs a large and expensive external multi-terabyte RAID server. 3TB internal, or 15TB external at great additional cost, plus archiving becomes 3X the headache that it is now with XDCam footage.
We’re largely a PC shop here. I’ve used Vegas several times last year, when we didn’t have workstations that met the hardware requirements for CS3, but had HDV footage to edit. It works, but the scaling algorithms are awful, and scaled to SD, footage is full of aliasing and jaggies. When we moved up to quad core workstations, it was a breath of fresh air to get away from Vegas’ UI and back to Premiere Pro’s familiar UI.
But here again with XDCam, we’re back to using Vegas like Cineform, to convert XDCam footage to AVI.
I heard on the Adobe forum that the posted article, now a 404 link, was posted April 1. Could it be all a big hoax, this purported free update?
Posted by Mark Weiss on 04/11 at 03:54 PM